Chair Shots With Killem Faulkner: Full Gear Go-Home Dynamite

We are just days away from the penultimate AEW pay-per-view of 2023, and with its final Dynamite before Full Gear, the company looked to fire up its fanbase for the big Saturday show. Ontario, California played host to a show that featured two singles champions in action, a title eliminator match, and a huge branded street fight between eight of its biggest stars. Did the show kick excitement into a higher gear (see what I did there?) or did it end up just spinning its wheels?

Best Match of the Night

This was not the strongest go-home show in AEW history, particularly when it comes to in-ring action, but blah blah go-home shows are hard blah nobody wants to get hurt blah blah blah you’ve heard me say this a million times. Oddly enough, there were lots of wrestlers on this show who will be featured on Full Gear, especially in the main event pitting the team of Chris Jericho, Kenny Omega, Kota Ibushi, and Paul Wight against the team of Konosuke Takeshita, “Powerhouse” Will Hobbs, Kyle Fletcher, and Brian Cage. This was billed as the Like a Dragon Gaiden Street Fight but the on-screen graphic gave us its full Christian name: Like a Dragon Gaiden The Man Who Erased His Name Street Fight. Yes, that’s the full name of the video game because Like a Dragon Gaiden wasn’t descriptive enough, I guess. (Please don’t try to explain to me why it actually needs that long word salad name, just reading the Wikipedia page for the series gives me a headache and I don’t want to devote any more thought to it.) Anyway, this match was fun, mostly inoffensive nonsense that kind of didn’t need to happen or be nearly as violent as it was but at least provided a decent main event for the show. It also provided some of the most insane spots of the night. Kota Ibushi slowly rode a bicycle down the ramp to ringside to gently tap…I mean violently assault Kyle Fletcher and Konosuke Takeshita before getting clotheslined off the bike by Brian Cage and brainbustered onto the bike by Takeshita. (Also, Excalibur got to channel his inner Dusty Rhodes, yelling out “he’s got a bicycle” in an exaggerated southern accent.) Fletcher piledrove Ibushi through a sign onto several chairs, and Powerhouse Hobbs slammed Paul Wight into the corner of the windshield (but mostly the hood) of a car in the parking lot. I suspect the spot was meant to have Wight land entirely on the gimmicked glass to minimize the impact, but he under-rotated on the slam and landed in what looked like a very painful moment before rolling off the hood of the car. Yikes. Why Hobbs didn’t just pin Wight after this cringe-inducing spot, I don’t know. Kenny Omega and Chris Jericho duct taped Hobbs to the ring ropes, and I just have to say as a person with plenty of hair that I doubt it was fun extracting him from all that tape afterwards. Like I suspect Omega and Jericho were originally supposed to just put a couple of strips of tape over his mouth, but because he’s a big sweaty man it looked like they called an audible when they felt like the first strip wasn’t sticking to his face and just wrapped the tape all the way around his head. Thankfully he doesn’t have that much facial hair to get in the way and his hair isn’t that long in the back, but still. I’m not a fan of letting anything adhesive near my hair for this exact reason. That sidebar aside, Omega took advantage of Hobbs being neutralized to hit the One-Winged Angel on Brian Cage for the win. This finish was fine but called the logic of the rest of the match into question – why didn’t Hobbs or Jericho (who hit a Judas Effect on Takeshita after he tried to leap off a soda fridge) go for a pin while they were backstage with nobody to interfere? Now, maybe the final pinfall in this street fight was required to take place in the ring, but then why did anybody leave the ringside area in the first place? Also, I don’t remember anybody even attempting a pin before the end of the match. Granted, a lot of the biggest spots of the match happened outside the ring, but why wouldn’t someone from the Don Callis Family at least try to get Ibushi into the ring after that insane piledriver spot, or Omega after Cage superplexed him through a table on the outside? So the match gets big points for the performers going all out to create memorable spots and loses some points for not really making sense when you actually think about it. That’s pretty standard for a hardcore multi-man match, and considering this was a weekly TV match that’s not a dealbreaker. However, I do genuinely think there were two better matches on this show.

One match that I think was better executed than the main event was the opening tag match of Jon Moxley & Wheeler Yuta against Orange Cassidy & Hook. Knowing that the Blackpool Combat Club guys like to take the fight to the outside of the ring, Cassidy and Hook jumped them before they could get into the ring to start the match, This set the tone for a hard-hitting battle that established both Hook and Cassidy as capable of standing toe-to-toe with the more physical technicians of the BCC. One of the biggest spots, if you can call it that, was when Hook and Moxley came face-to-face, with no hesitation or intimidation evident on the face of the younger competitor. Even Cassidy, who is normally more of a comedic wrestler, dialed up the intensity and dialed back his usual schtick. In the end, however, it was the superior teamwork of the BCC boys that won the day, as Yuta blocked Hook from locking in Redrum to allow Moxley to hit the Death Rider and Yuta secured the win with his seatbelt pin. I wasn’t such a fan of Mox effectively no-selling the Orange Punch – I get that he staggered a bit to show that the hit registered, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone’s finisher not lead to a pinfall, much less not even take their opponent off their feet. Yes, Moxley is almost always portrayed as one of the toughest SOBs on the roster, so if anybody’s going to do that sort of thing, it makes sense that it would be him. I just personally don’t think anybody should really do it, at least not without some serious explanation like Cassidy having his hand worked over the entire match. That wasn’t the case here, and since OC took some time off after his lengthy first International Championship reign in which he was physically battered after defending the belt each week, he should have been throwing that punch with all the force he could muster. Anyway, that slight objection to the finish aside, this was a really good match and established Mox as a serious threat to take Cassidy’s title on Saturday night. The storyline between these two has been kept fairly simple, with Mox beating Cassidy for the title at All Out before suffering an injury and dropping the belt to Rey Fenix, who was then defeated by Cassidy to regain the title. Mox felt he was cheated out of the title and OC took advantage to win the title back despite not being able to beat him directly, so the onus is now on Cassidy to prove otherwise. Their match at Full Gear should be good if not necessarily a threat to steal the show, but I’ll get to my predictions later. For now, I’ll just say that this was a fun preview of that match and allowed everyone involved to look good while protecting the champ Cassidy in defeat.

The best match of the night, in my opinion, was the Young Bucks vs. Penta & Komander, who was filling in for an injured Rey Fenix. (That injury is probably also why Mox isn’t more angry at him and is instead going after Cassidy instead. We might hopefully get a triple threat for the International Title somewhere down the line.) I’m sure there are those who will complain about the psychology and selling on display here, but I am definitely one of the many fans of that faster-paced indie lucha libre style so it didn’t bother me too much. Don’t get me wrong, a Canadian destroyer that fails to even take your opponent off their feet is logic-obliterating, but I’m okay when the opponent rolls out of the ring or kicks out of what might otherwise be a finisher for someone else. Do not tell me a superkick is the same as the Sweet Chin Music – the only difference between a signature move and a finisher is how well established it is, and there are plenty of wrestlers (*cough* Chris Jericho *cough*) whose finishers are way less impactful than regular moves done by themselves or others, so you can’t purely judge a move by its apparent impact. Plus lots of moves that actually would hurt quite a lot if done for real don’t look all that great in a wrestling context, so the rule of cool should largely supersede the “um acktchually” crowd that only wants to see realistic strikes and submission holds. Wrestling is fun and silly and impossible to fully take seriously, that’s my point. Anyway, back to the match at hand, which was fun and silly and impossible to fully take seriously. The big story here was the Jackson brothers working fully heel – in front of a southern California crowd, no less – as the finish saw a pair of low blows behind the ref’s back and a Judas Effect before the BTE Trigger put Komander away. Again, as with the opener, I appreciate that it was clear the more cohesive team won with the more established member of the losing team being protected in defeat. The Bucks going heel is an interesting choice, considering Jericho is the more natural villain in this scenario, but the Jacksons are very comfortable as heels in their own right so I suppose it should be okay. Penta likely isn’t going to do anything much until his brother is healthy again, so he’ll be fine too. I’m not saying this match was a masterpiece, but for a relatively weak night of wrestling, it was certainly the best of the bunch and would have been a perfectly enjoyable TV match on basically any of AEW’s weekly shows.

Best Moment of the Night

Unsurprisingly for a go-home show, the promos and segments that filled in between and around the matches fared slightly better. Maxwell Jacob Friedman and Jay White‘s show-closing segment was one such moment that worked well this week – it probably won’t be the sole reason anyone will now order Full Gear who hadn’t already planned to buy it, but it was a fitting end to the final main show before the pay-per-view. (I guess there will be an episode of Collision on Friday, so this wasn’t the absolute last regular TV show, but you get the point.) MJF apologized to The Acclaimed and Adam Cole for getting hurt because of him and vowed to make whoever stole his devil mask pay for their actions, before Switchblade interrupted him and told him to drop the hero act, as he is and always will be the villain. The rest of Bullet Club Gold snuck up on the champ, but he managed to fight them off before Juice Robinson dropped him with his Left Hand of God punch, the Gunns hit 3:10 to Yuma, and White picked the bones with a Blade Runner. After the Gunns won a squash match earlier in the night to make a point that the dual champ has no chance against them without a partner, Max held his own pretty well until it became 3- and then 4-on-1, suggesting that perhaps he doesn’t need backup to retain the Ring of Honor tag titles. At the same time, the sheer numbers game BCG is capable of bringing to bear suggests that MJF is in real danger of losing both his titles on Saturday night. Both Friedman and White are known for their promo skills, so that portion of the segment was unsurprisingly the strongest point, and the brawl that closed out the show was decent enough as well.

I’m going to give an honorable mention to a really minor moment that maybe didn’t register for as many fans as it should have, but if you’ve ever seen the “Samoa Joe is unimpressed with your flying move” meme, you should know that this week’s match against Jon Cruz featured one of the all-timers. Not only did Joe walk away as Cruz was flying through the air toward him, as per usual, but Cruz pulled an absolutely hilarious facial expression as he crashed down to the mat, shrugging as if to say “hey, where are you going?” It was a great comedic moment in an otherwise unremarkable squash match, as the unmasked Serpentico got basically no offense before being put away with the Coquina Clutch. At the very least there was one moment that was memorable, which is more than you can say for most squashes.

The best segment of the night by a long shot was Hangman Adam Page‘s promo against Swerve Strickland. Yes, you read that correctly, Page’s promo, not Page and Strickland’s promos. Swerve didn’t get a word in edgewise as the fiery babyface laid into him for invading his home, putting him on blast for being fired (by WWE), getting dumped by his fiancée, and losing touch with his kids over the past year. He said that the issues between them were professional until Swerve made it personal, and he promised to teach him a lesson for that mistake in their Texas Deathmatch on Saturday. Page punctuated the segment by pointing out that although they weren’t allowed to get physical ahead of their match at Full Gear, there was nothing preventing him from putting his hands on Swerve’s stooge Prince Nana, blasting him with a surprise assault that required security to separate them since Strickland couldn’t lay a hand on him for fear of being suspended for the remainder of the year. Page continued to fight against the security guards, emphatically laying one poor soul out with a Buckshot Lariat. The heels retreated, Page stood tall in the ring, and the segment ended on an undeniable high. This rivalry has probably been stretched out longer than it needed to be, but this segment did a lot of work in getting the crowd invested in both the match and in Page’s character, who has undeniably slipped a bit from his peak as one of the most popular babyfaces in the company. A promo like this goes a long way in demonstrating that he is still capable of holding a crowd in the palm of his hand and getting a massive reaction when he lets his actions speak even louder than his words. If I had to bet on one match stealing the spotlight from the world title match at Full Gear, it would be Swerve vs. Hangman.

Worst Matches/Moments of the Night

There was a good deal of filler because yadda yadda go-home show, but nothing offensively bad. Roderick Strong’s schtick is wearing a little thin for me, but at least the segment was short, Wardlow’s pre-taped promo was basically nothing, and Red Velvet somehow failed her way into a TBS Championship Eliminator match despite losing her return match last week. (She lost again, as Skye Blue will face off against Kris Statlander and Julia Hart in a three-way match that anyone who’s been paying attention saw a mile off.) Are any of these segments worthy of official inclusion in this section of the review? Nah, but I get tired of just saying “nothing” here every week, and I have plenty of material for the next section so I figured I’d mention the weaker stuff on the show here instead.

Parting Shots

• Mariah May got a fairly frosty reception from Toni Storm this week, but the most notable takeaway from this segment was that Storm asked for a tune-up match on Friday’s Collision. Storm’s match with Hikaru Shida has not gotten much fanfare lately, so it will be interesting to see if they can drum up some excitement on the final show before Full Gear. We’ll also see if AEW chooses to develop the relationship between May and Storm heading into the pay-per-view, as May was introduced fairly late into proceedings and we’re really not sure what, if any, role she will play.
• Kota Ibushi is officially All Elite! Feels like that should have been made official months ago, but better late than never, I guess. It will be interesting to see what the company does with him going forward because he’s almost exclusively tagged with Kenny Omega in big multi-man matches so far. Maybe now that he’s actually a full member of the roster, he’ll be involved in his own storylines away from the Cleaner, or maybe the Golden Lovers will get involved in the tag division.
• It’s Full Gear predictions time! Let’s run down who I think will win each match, from least to most confidence, based on what we know so far.
  • FTR will regain the AEW World Tag Team Championships from Big Bill and Ricky Starks in their multi-team match that will also involve the Kings of the Black Throne (Malakai Black and Brody King) and La Faccion Ingobernable (probably Rush and Dralistico, but I don’t think they’ve announced which two members will represent LFI here) – this is my least confident prediction as I think Black and King could easily win and Bill and Ricky could easily retain, but it just feels like they took the belts off FTR because of an injury concern and the big money match in the tag division is FTR vs. the Young Bucks.
  • The Gunns will defeat MJF for the Ring of Honor Tag Team Championships – unless Adam Cole returns or MJF begrudgingly accepts someone like Samoa Joe’s help, this would be the logical outcome, but MJF did defeat The Righteous all by himself at All In, so who can say? Also it would kind of suck for the brochachos to lose their titles before Cole can get healthy, but if he’s really injured (more on that in a second) and won’t be back for a while, I feel like RoH needs actual tag champs who can defend the belts more regularly.
  • Christian Cage, Luchasaurus, and Nick Wayne will defeat Sting, Darby Allin, and Adam Copeland – this one could go either way, but I feel like both Sting and Copeland need motivation to drive them forward, especially Sting as he nears his retirement match next year. Nothing is on the line in this one, so I could easily see the heels cheating to win, especially if Christian gifts Nick Wayne the victory to cement his status as the patriarch of this faction. (Plus that could drive a wedge between Cage and Luchasaurus, who frequently got wins stolen from him by the man who was supposed to be taking him under his wing.)
  • Kris Statlander will retain the TBS Championship against Skye Blue and Julia Hart – I really want to believe that Blue will turn on Stat and claim the title for herself, much to the delight of Hart, but I don’t know if AEW will be that bold. Statlander won the title a relatively short time ago, and she defeated Jade Cargill who had held the title forever, so it would make sense to let her hold onto the belt a bit longer at least.
  • Orange Cassidy will retain the International Championship against Jon Moxley – I said before Mox won the title in the first place that he doesn’t need any title except the world championship, and I still believe that to be true. Besides, why have Moxley look dominant on Dynamite if not to set up Cassidy as the underdog winner at the pay-per-view. However, AEW has shown a willingness to do the opposite of what I think they should do with regards to the International Championship and Moxley in particular, so this one could still go either way.
  • Toni Storm will defeat Hikaru Shida for the AEW Women’s World Championship – AEW has relatively little invested in Shida, unfortunately, and Storm looks like a breakout star, so I fully expect her to win unless the plan is to use Mariah May to keep the title off her for now.
  • Hangman Page will defeat Swerve Strickland in a Texas Deathmatch – after the promo segment this week, I don’t see how AEW doesn’t heat up the Anxious Millennial Cowboy with a rivalry-ending victory here. He was the one victimized by Swerve, so he needs to get his vindication in a definitive manner. Besides, I think Page should be the one to team up with Kenny Omega (if not Kota Ibushi) to take on the newly heel Young Bucks rather than Chris Jericho, and Swerve can parlay his performance in this rivalry into bigger and better things in the singles division. Maybe even a feud with Orange Cassidy over the International Championship would be a good direction for him.
  • MJF retains the AEW World Championship against Jay White – unless White himself is revealed to be the one under the devil mask, which would be a stupid twist ending, or someone else from Bullet Club, I just don’t see him being the one to dethrone MJF. I will make a secondary prediction here – I think the devil will be revealed at Full Gear, and I expect it will be one of the following, in descending order of likelihood: Adam Cole, Roderick Strong, Will Ospreay, Jack Perry, or CM Punk. I know, I know, the last one is probably a bit of wishful thinking on my part, but thematically it makes a ton of sense – MJF revealed himself under the devil mask on the same night Punk won the title at All Out, so it would be a nice bit of symmetry for Punk to return the favor now that MJF is the champ. I still think it’s most likely Adam Cole, who will be revealed to have faked his injury to stab his “best friend” in the back, but in my heart of hearts I’m going to be a little disappointed if it isn’t Punk.
  • The Young Bucks will defeat Chris Jericho and Kenny Omega – this just straight up needs to happen. Nobody cares about “the Golden Jets” and there’s no point in pretending otherwise by making them the #1 contenders for the tag titles. Like I said, Bucks vs. FTR makes the most sense, probably at World’s End. I originally thought Jericho might turn on Kenny to cost them the match, but with the Bucks turning heel I don’t think that’s necessary anymore.
• I’m going to make a bonus prediction and say that even if Will Ospreay is revealed as the masked devil, he will not be the big signing that Tony Khan has promised. Rather, I think Mercedes Moné will be the person to sign with AEW, setting up a huge title match for World’s End against Toni Storm.

That’s it for another week – decent show overall, not the hottest Dynamite ever but it did what it needed to ahead of Full Gear. I hope the big signing we’ve been promised and the impending reveal of who’s been causing havoc under the devil mask will make for a hot end of the year and a hot start to 2024, because I do feel like AEW has started to stagnate a bit lately. Just as a reminder, this is my last regular review of 2023 – I am still planning on writing my regular end-of-year video game list and probably a year in review for professional wrestling (mostly AEW) before the end of December, but I will be taking a break from the regular Chair Shots format until at least January. I hope you all enjoy Full Gear, I hope you have a great holiday season, and I will see you next time for more Chair Shots!